VIENNA, Oct 11 A new way of making nuclear fuel
with lasers may help cut costs and ensure energy security but
could also make it easier for rogue states to secretly build
nuclear weapons if they got hold of the know-how.

A debate about the benefits and dangers of using lasers
instead of centrifuges to enrich uranium underlines the
sensitivities surrounding nuclear activity that can have both
civilian and military applications.

Iran, whose underground centrifuge plants and history of
hiding nuclear work from U.N. inspectors have raised Western
suspicions of a covert atom bomb programme and prompted Israeli
threats to attack Iranian nuclear sites, says it already has
laser technology but experts doubt Tehran has mastered it.

Uranium can provide the explosive core of a nuclear warhead
if refined to a high fissile concentration, explaining why any
country or other actor interested in obtaining nuclear arms
might be eager to learn about technical advances in enrichment.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last month
issued a license to a partnership between General Electric Co.
and Japan's Hitachi Ltd to build and run a laser
enrichment plant for manufacturing reactor fuel.

It would be the world's first facility to refine uranium on
a commercial scale using lasers, a technique "particularly
suited for nuclear proliferation", said Assistant Professor R.
Scott Kemp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"It appears that they have allowed the license to go forward
without a serious review of the proliferation implications,"
said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control
Association, a Washington-based advocacy and research group.

An NRC spokesman said a State Department assessment in 1999
concluded essentially that it was in the U.S. interest to bring
the Australian technology "here, where it could be properly
safeguarded, rather than having other countries develop it".

Citing an NRC letter to U.S. lawmakers two years ago, David
McIntyre added that NRC requirements - covering the facility's
security and protection of classified information - "effectively
protect against the threat of proliferation".

Kimball disagreed. "History shows that even the best efforts
to safeguard sensitive enrichment technologies can and will
eventually fail."

IRAN "POSSESSES" LASER TECHNOLOGY

General Electric said Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) - the
GE-Hitachi company which would build the plant in the U.S. state
of North Carolina - had "met - and in many cases exceeded - all
regulations pertaining to safeguarding this technology."

GLE head Chris Monetta said the laser method "could be one
of the keys to the nation's long-term energy security."

However, some nuclear proliferation experts worry because
plants enriching uranium with lasers could be smaller - and
therefore even harder to discover - than the traditional
facilities with rows and rows of centrifuge machines.

Lasers could also refine fuel-grade uranium to possible
weapons grade in fewer steps than centrifuges, they say.

Those features could make laser enrichment an attractive
option for any state wanting to develop covertly the capability
to produce nuclear weapons, which the West is accusing Iran of
doing with its centrifuge-based programme.

Tehran - which only disclosed the existence of its Fordow
subterranean centrifuge site in 2009 after learning that Western
spy services had spotted it - denies any nuclear bomb designs.

"The smaller physical footprint and lower energy
requirements would make a clandestine laser facility more
difficult to detect," said Jim Walsh, a research associate at
MIT's Security Studies Program.

But Olli Heinonen, a former U.N. chief nuclear inspector,
played down concerns that embarking on laser enrichment in the
United States would cause the technology to spread elsewhere.

"Technology holders have been fairly good in recent years in
protecting their secrets. Proliferation mainly took in place in
the 1970s and 1980s due to poor export controls and
legislation," said Heinonen, now at Harvard University's Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs.

His former employer, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), has tried in vain to get more information about a 2010
statement by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Tehran
"possessed" laser enrichment technology but would not use it.

"Iran had its own laser programme, and they have got a good
understanding about the process," Heinonen said, referring to
methods used before the GLE's newer technology.

GROWING NUCLEAR FUEL MARKET

But laser enrichment is more difficult to master than
centrifuges and the equipment used in Iran's research has been
dismantled and placed in storage under IAEA monitoring, said the
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank.

"Based on the IAEA assessment it appears unlikely that
Iran's laser enrichment programme represents a serious
proliferation threat," IISS said in a 2011 report.

Centrifuges increase the ratio of the fissile isotope U-235
by spinning at supersonic speed, enriching up to 5 percent for
power plants and 90 percent concentration for bombs.

Laser beams can also separate uranium isotopes, but MIT's
Kemp said the technology had been pursued unsuccessfully for
decades. "Indeed we do not yet know whether" the technique to be
used by GLE will work or not, he added.

Laser enrichment could produce half the refined uranium the
United States needs each year for its nuclear reactors,
according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

General Electric plans to build the first plant on its
campus in North Carolina, but it said a "commercialisation
decision", based on several factors, must still be made.

It would use lasers conceived by Australia-based Silex
Systems Ltd and developed by experts of GLE, the
GE-Hitachi partnership in which Cameco Corp., the
world's largest uranium producer, also holds a 24 percent stake.

Silex said on its web site that the uranium enrichment
market was expected to grow to $20 billion by 2030 from $6
billion now, highlighting the technology's commercial potential.

It said the method its scientists invented in the 1990s had
several advantages over other ways to refine uranium: higher
efficiency, lower operating costs and less capital expenditure.

But Tom Clements of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability,
a non-governmental U.S.-based group, said such advantages also
held nuclear proliferation risks.

The NRC's approval of the license without a specific
proliferation assessment "may well be a green light for the
eventual spread of what could be a dangerous technology which
has nuclear weapons applications," Clements said.

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